Brother Sharp




Brother Sharp is a meme about a homeless man from Ningbo, Zhejiang, a province in China. The frenzy all began when Brother Sharp was walking around in the streets of Ningbo, and a guy photographed him, and posted his photo on a local discussion forum. Brother Sharp instantly created a hot online topic in China and other Asian cities because everyone labeled him as a very handsome and cool homeless man. They gave him the nicknames of Brother Sharp and Homeless Prince because no one ever seen a homeless man as effortlessly "chic" as him. The meme introduces why Brother Sharp is so popular, how he was discovered and provides a bit of background information about him. We don't know much about Brother Sharp as there are many speculations about his past, but it's concluded for now that he did have his own family, wife and kids before, but mysteriously he somehow ended up being homeless.

Due to Brother Sharp's choice of clothing, physical appearance, and his signature photo of him smoking on the street, many internet users have popularized him and photoshopped him into different film posters, celebrity and model photos, etc. Know Your Memes deconstructs Brother Sharp by describing his physical appearance (because that is mainly why he is so popular) and they start with comparing "homeless" or "hipster" guys, then with their description, they indirectly labelled him as a hipster folk hero. They make Brother Sharp memetic and also adds a bit of humor into the video with the whole folk hero analogy, their ways of mapping out other folk heroes, their translations on what Brother Sharp is depicted as and the whole idea of him being depicted as a hero on the web.